Myth #1: There are no bread­lines any­more, so peo­ple need to stop act­ing like hunger is a prob­lem in the U.S. This is patently untrue. Peo­ple are still hun­gry in the U.S. and there ARE still bread­lines, they just don’t look the same. They’re spread out and less vis­i­ble. They’re in front of food pantries. When I lived in George­town, TX, there was a line that stretched out for two blocks in front of the food pantry near our house every other Sun­day. Bread lines are also at gro­cery stores at mid­night at the begin­ning of the month. I’m not the only food stamp recip­i­ent who goes to the gro­cery store at 11:30 on the 2nd of the month (my ben­e­fits are loaded on the 3rd) and makes sure to check out after mid­night. Bill Simon, the U.S. CEO of Wal-Mart, said in 2010,

“And you need not go fur­ther than one of our stores on mid­night at the end of the month. And it’s real inter­est­ing to watch, about 11 p.m., cus­tomers start to come in and shop, fill their gro­cery bas­ket with basic items, baby for­mula, milk, bread, eggs, and con­tinue to shop and mill about the store until mid­night, when … gov­ern­ment elec­tronic ben­e­fits cards get acti­vated and then the check­out starts and occurs. And our sales for those first few hours on the first of the month are sub­stan­tially and sig­nif­i­cantly higher. And if you really think about it, the only rea­son some­body gets out in the mid­dle of the night and buys baby for­mula is that they need it, and they’ve been wait­ing for it. Oth­er­wise, we are open 24 hours—come at 5 a.m., come at 7 a.m., come at 10 a.m. But if you are there at mid­night, you are there for a reason.”

So our bread lines aren’t as vis­i­ble (remem­ber that food stamps are loaded on three dif­fer­ent dates, mean­ing the uptick in cus­tomers on one of those dates at mid­night might not be as obvi­ous to the casual observer), but many peo­ple are find­ing it dif­fi­cult to eat in this coun­try. The fact that 44,708,726 peo­ple, about 1 in every 7 Amer­i­cans, are enrolled in SNAP sug­gests that a lot of peo­ple are fac­ing eco­nomic hard­ships bad enough to result in food insecurity.